Angels & Devils

Summary:
Seattle has been invaded by covens of Rogue Vampires - vampires who hunt and prey upon other vampires. Bella and the Cullen siblings are in Seattle for a rare night out on the town. They are attacked by Rogues, and Alice Cullen is lost in the ambush. The family fears the worse, believing that Alice is dead.
Alice awakens with no memory of who she is, where she is or how she came to be there. She also has no clue that's she's fallen into the hands of an old enemy to her kind. A half-vampire who once waged a 50-year long war of vengeance against all vampires.
A enemy so vicious that the Volturi had dubbed him with the name, "Lucifer", and who was long since believed to be dead himself.

Notes:
This is my first Twilight Fanfic. It is currently posted in part to the FanFiction.Net site under the same pen name, and has 52 chapters up. There is still a few hundred more pages that are written and waiting to go. I decided to post this to a few fanfic sites to see what feedback I can get from the experts.
This story has some violence, language, and minor adult situations (not too descriptive or vulgar - I tried to keep in mind how SM handled such things in writing.) so I guess this would need a "R" rating.
Thanks.

4. Chapter 4: I tried to kill the pain, but only brought more.

I'm dying, praying,Bleeding, I'm screaming,Am I too lost to be saved?Am I too lost?"

It was pretty lucky for me that I thought I knew of a reasonable place to start looking for the answers I needed.

While my computer warmed up, I tried to recall what I knew about vampires in general, which still didn’t amount to much as far as caring for one. What I had been good at years ago… was killing them. I finally remembered something curious that I had been given as an odd form of civility that might be helpful, something that I had all but nearly forgotten in the last part of this new century.

I left the large Banshee knife sticking in the floor by the bed, figuring I would not have need of it for a while. The vampire girl was totally out of it again, deep in that unnatural slumber, looking like a corpse for all intensive purposes.

However, her skin had now recovered some of its natural smooth marble coloring and tone again, probably from my blood donation. Her face even glowed with that odd eternal vampire beauty they all had, instead of that sickly pale she’d had when I originally brought her into the bedroom.

She looked a bit more like that dancing sprite from the nightclub.

I made a quick stop in the spare bathroom, grabbing a roll of tape and one of bandage gauze; I quickly bound up the still healing slice in my wrist. It would be a few hours before it was totally gone, and where I was going next, I didn’t want the bother of any dust or dirt getting into it.

I glanced up and caught my reflection in the mirror over the small sink, and it made me pause for a moment.

The unearthly beauty of vampires had always disgusted me in the past, mostly because I knew it for what it was… simply a lure to help entice their victims to them. Seeing it had always set my teeth on edge, maybe that’s one of the reason I’d never been affected by the power of that glamour.

That girl on the bed however, some strange inner voice was telling me she was something more than just a common undead predator. Her glow seemed to come more from her inner soul than from a hunting tool, as I reflected on it, I think that’s what bothered me most on stage tonight while she danced in front of me.

Even if I was no longer at war with them, I didn’t really want to view her or any vampire in that way, because I knew them for what they were. Even though the color of her eyes told me she was one of the few that didn’t hunt humans for food, I knew better than to think that meant she could be trusted or that I should let my guard down.

Even after all this time of peace, I still didn’t want to give any of them a human quality, so I had done my best on stage to look away from her all night long. Looking back on it now, I wonder if that was what was keeping her so amused? I consider the thought only briefly before discarding it, as that would mean that the vamp girl was aware that I knew what she was, and I highly doubted that could be the case.

I looked back myself in the mirror, and thought how laughable and contradicting my prejudice was.

In truth, I wasn’t anymore human than that girl in my spare bedroom was. I didn’t have the strange attractiveness that lured humans that full vampires had, but I in fact shared some of their other traits.

I had by a quirky twist of fate turned myself when I was twenty-five years old, and dying of what now in modern times is known as Hodgkin’s disease, a sickness of the lymphatic system.

In the looking-glass staring back at me was the face of a man in his mid-thirties, though it had taken me the better part of ninety-five years to age those extra ten years and get here.

I still had the blue eyes I had been born, and that never changed, except for occasional times when the fangs came out. Long dark brown hair that I’ve had off and on since the 60’s to somewhat change my appearance, and that now went down passed my shoulders to my upper back in true rock-star style. And at just an inch over six-foot tall, I was pretty average for the most part in my humble opinion.

I was no longer sick with a life threatening illness of course, but as I already noted, I was aging at a rate much slower than humans. My heart still beat, but much slower than a human’s heart beat most times. My body temperature also was slightly cooler, blood pressure slightly lower, my skin a little tougher than human but nowhere near as almost indestructible as a full vampire’s.

I had some of the natural weapons of a true vampire, to some extent – if you wanted to stretch the facts a might bit.

My teeth were nearly perfect, no cavities or wear, and there never will be. But I would wager that they weren’t as tough and sharp as a true vamp’s. The retracting fangs I had were a throwback to somewhere back in the vampire genetic line, before they lost them and evolved to better blend in with their prey… the human race.

A true vampire’s fingers and nails looked normal but could crush stone into powder. Mine were nowhere near as powerful and my nails would change into sharp claws if I wanted them… or if I became really annoyed with someone or something. They seem to be able to slash through a lot of things, the most surprising of which is vampire flesh. There were many instants in my early days where that attribute saved my fool life.

Like the fangs, the claws gave me a creepy feeling when they changed, so I avoided that as much as possible. Avoiding as many creepy feelings as I could was also another reason why I prefer bladed weapons to my natural ones.

And of course, I have no venom.

Lacking such, I very much doubt that I have the ability to change anyone else into a vampire like me, but then again to be honest I’ve never tried. I never wanted to sentence another soul to this living hell and I never will.

That beautiful girl in the other room, deep in whatever infirmity currently held her, would always be about nineteen, and would remain so forever… unless she were somehow destroyed.

I was getting slowly older… and I think would eventually die of old age… if someone or something along the way didn’t kill me first.

I think I got the better deal all considered.

I turned the bathroom light off on my way out, and moved quietly thorough the bedroom and out the door, not that there was really any real need for silence with the vamp out cold.

I returned to the same storeroom in the basement where I had retrieved the Banshee from less than an hour ago. I turned on the single hanging light, and began to sort though a few dusty crates and footlockers I also kept there.

I thought there was a pretty good chance that I might never find what I was looking for, I was never one for organizing things that I didn’t deem important to my survival. Lady Luck smiled on me, and I did come across the item I wanted in one of the first lockers I searched.

I pulled my prize from the musty depths of the trunk and blew a light coating of dust from its heavy cardboard cover. I cracked open the first few pages, to find the neatly typed pages were still almost pristine. Whatever paper that crazy vampire had used for his manuscript had to have been very expensive back then, to look this good after fifty-plus years.

In my hand, I held one of only five supposed copies of a tome that was the sum of all known vampire medical knowledge - as of about fifty-five years ago. This had been a parting gift from one of the three non-human hunting vampires who had struck a truce with me half a century ago, ending my one-man war against vampire kind.

The vamp that had given this thick volume to me, had hoped that I would allow him to study me and my condition after our bargain had been struck. He theorized after hearing a brief narration of my history that possibly my illness with that particular form of cancer, at the point where I turned, may or may not have had something to do with me being stuck as a early form of vampire.

I declined to be his lab rat of course. He accepted my disinterest graciously, but gave me the book on vampire medical knowledge he had been compiling, in the hopes that I would read it and someday reconsider his request.

Until today, I had never really opened it.

Thinking about it, brought back other memories of my past. I seemed to have misplaced, or lost, a lot about myself over the years. But there were some things I never could forget… because they had been burned into my mind and soul.

As I said, I became a half-breed vampire at 25 years of age, while slowly dying of a form of cancer at the time.

And after vampires had killed the only good thing god had seen fit to give me in my short life. My dear Stephanie Rachael had agreed to grant me my dying wish, to marry me even though she knew I wasn’t much longer for the world.

The year was 1914 and I had been born in 1889 in Buffalo, New York. Less than a month before Stephanie and I were to wed, we were strolling through a local park one evening, on one of my rare better feeling nights when I hadn’t been so tired, when three strangers appeared in our path from seemingly out of nowhere.

To make a long story short, they attacked like nothing human could, beating down my already failing body, and ripped Stephanie to pieces in their bloodlust… right before my eyes.

Like many others of the era, I had read Bram’s book about the bloodsucking demon, Dracula. Insane as it might sound to any normal person, it wasn’t hard to believe in such monsters at the moment. Not when they were drinking her blood down right before me. I thought I might have been mad, to see such a waking nightmare.

I remembered vainly hoping that Stephanie would shake me awake… but I was never to wake up from this dream.

Me, the fiends discarded as being too diseased for their taste. Apparently they could smell the sickness in me, and it disgusted them! They did find some sport to have with me however; they liked the idea of making me watch as they destroyed the only purely good thing I’d ever known outside of my parents.

One of the creatures always kept me pinned to the ground with one foot while the other two fed on my beloved. Not that I could have done much with what I judged to be several broken ribs anyway, even if they had been only mortal men.

When they were finished, two departed – having gotten what they came for, leaving the third to clean up and finish me off.

By his superior attitude, he seemed to be special among the group. He seem to take great pleasure in taunting me, telling me how he had been tracking Stephanie for two days until that night, almost as if he were bragging about a skill he possessed.

He had said the end of the stalk came when they found us alone in a nearly deserted park that evening.

Before I died, he wanted me to know for some reason the attack hadn’t been random, and it seemed to be of great satisfaction to him to let me know all the details of his ‘stalk’… including mentioning all the times and places he’d followed Stephanie, and the times he had seen both of us together.

He told me that nothing had amused him more than seeing my fiancée wearing my mother’s engagement ring, because he knew that her time was limited, that she had no future.

It might have been god’s will, pure luck, or just the simple fact he was too over confident and too cocky.

He leaned in too closely to me, perhaps to better feel my helpless rage. I don’t know when exactly I noticed it, but right before me, tucked into his belt was the bone handle of a large Bowie knife just inches from my reach.

To this very day, I’m not exactly sure how I got my hands on it. I was in a blind rage, and the next thing I knew the heavy knife was in my hands and I made a wild swing at the beast’s neck.

I thought to myself that there was no way my weak arms could catch the monster unaware. I’d only hope to make one last showing of defiance, to anger the bastard enough that he’d stop taunting me and just kill me out right. Hoping he send me on to where my Stephanie had already gone… and to where I was sure she was waiting for me

Instead, I felt a hard jar, as the blade cut most of the way through the vampire’s neck. He must have been surprised, as his eyes grew very wide and his hands went up to cover the gapping slit in his throat. Blood gashed out, and I found myself thinking that it all had to be Stephanie’s blood spilling on the ground… and that very thought fueled the fury inside me!

The vampire gurgled and then sat down hard right in front of me.

I recalled screaming as loud as I could – until I was sure that my throat was bleeding from the strain, and swinging the big knife again, this time using both hands on the handle. The blade hit again and this time, the vampire’s head flew off his neck.

The next thing I remembered was having crawled my way on top of the still moving body, where I hacked away at it like a enraged madman until I couldn’t raise the Bowie another time. My rage was such, that I never felt the shattered pieces of my ribs tearing up my insides.

When it was over, the vampire’s body lay in several pieces around me as well. Had I a clue then to the importance to what had just occurred, I might have made an effort to retain the Bowie, because it held a secret I would spend years searching for. However, I had more pressing issues, and I immediately lost track of the weapon as soon as my task was accomplished.

Every heavy breath I took at that moment brought more of my own blood up from my shredded lungs.

I was going to get my wish… I was dying.

I recall looking over at the remains of my sweet Stephanie, and knowing that the other two undead monsters had escaped retribution. The wrath I felt grew and burnt bright despite my waning life, and it would never be satisfied until the other two responsible for talking her away from me were dead as well.

That wild fire would never go out until every single one of the unclean beasts was dead… dead as a race!

The book about Dracula said that drinking the blood of a vampire could transform a dying mortal into a vampire. I couldn’t fight them as I was, sick and now dying, but I could as one of them! Surely my righteous fury would keep me from becoming like them I had thought crazily.

So I did the unthinkable… I drink the blood of my first vampire victim.

It was vile, putrid, and I nearly vomited from my first mouthful, and had my rage not still been so intense I might have given up right then. I swallowed that first draught of blood, forcing it down, never taking my eyes from my fiancée’s body to further steel my will. When I accomplished that, I drank even more. I kept going until my throat was raw and I was sure that I had poisoned myself because of the way my stomach had started to roll and burn. I kept feeding myself until I could not longer get anything from the stump of the monster’s neck.

Within a few minutes of stopping… I was in hell. Literally.

I was a burning man, and I remember screaming to the heavens… cursing fate, cursing god, and most of all, cursing the vampires.

I don’t know how I came to be there, but I woke up three days later in a halfway house, surrounded by bums and merchant sailors who were down on their luck or waiting a call to ship out. I woke up in mid morning surprised to be alive, and was disappointed when the sun didn’t burn me.

I could still see myself in the lone mirror in the communal bathroom, posted over the sink just like the one I had been looking into a short while ago, ninety-five years later.

My heart still beat, I still drew in a breath every few seconds like clockwork, and the crosses hanging on just about every wall in the house had absolutely no ill effect on me at all.

My first day as a vampire was a total bust. My bid to become immortal had failed, and with it, any hope of revenge. So depressed was I, that I failed to wonder at how I could be still on this side of the grave in the first place, nor did I seem to notice that my ribs no longer pained me at all!

It would be a few days before I’d learn differently… and began to start figuring out what the new rules of my life were.

There was a major war starting at that time, if you recall, so no one at the halfway house paid very much attention to me. Men were constantly coming and going as the country geared up to fight in a conflict that would involve nearly the entire world.

I had no clue as to how I got to the halfway house to began with, but I’d immediately found somebody had gone through my pockets and even taken my shoes. I had no ID or money at all. It was as if I was being born anew with nothing at all to tie me to my old life. I never even went back to my old home again; as I felt the memories it held would have been too much to bear.

The first real clue I had that something had changed was the normal pain in my chest from the disease – it was gone!

Suspicious and hoping beyond reasonable logic, I had myself examined by a visiting physician when I had the chance. I had not mentioned the illness I had been previously suffering from to the doctor at all, but he confirmed it for me after a brief examination. Except for a slow heartbeat and slightly low body temperature, I was as healthily as a horse… my disease was in fact, entirely gone!

The doctor suggested seeing I was so fit, I might want to enlist and help the war effort. I remember smiling and telling him a war was exactly what I had in mind.

The newspapers had carried reports of Stephanie’s murder… though the authorities classified it as an animal attack of some kind. Of me, they only reported that I had been missing as well, but given the evidence found at the scene that I was presumed dead.

My prior unhealthy circumstance was no secret to anyone who knew me, and a trail of blood that led from the scene eventually came to a dead end when the investigators followed it. The current thought was that in my wounded condition, and weakened from my cancer, that I might have crawled off somewhere in the park and died as a result of the attack. They were still searching for my body even then.

When pressed for an explanation by the public, the local authorities speculated that a pack of wolves or wild dogs had found the shoreline of Lake Erie into the park and had attacked there.

At the time I found it odd there was no mention of a second dismembered body being found at the scene, as I was reasonably certain I had left the vampire I’d killed there.

It was sometime later that I would learn the proper way to dispose of a vamp’s body with fire, and it would be some years later when I crossed paths with that Tracker again. and gleefully killed him the right way.

I can tell you by that time I had honed my technique somewhat more, and that Tracker vamp had wished he’d died that first time when I was through with him the second.

I started my campaign of vengeance within two weeks of waking in the halfway house, and spent the next forty-five years killing every vampire I ran across.

It was only a decade or so until my body count started to be noticed, and could no longer be kept secret from the Volturi and gradually drew their attention. In later years they would send a few agents to try and take care of me. Apparently they were very incensed that a mere human not only knew of their existence, but that same mere human also had the audacity to kill a great many immortals.

I added a bunch of Volturi minions to my tally too for their troubles.

That made me really popular with the Italians as time passed.

And then things got really hot at home.

Eventually in the late 1950’s, the Italian bloodsuckers assigned a group of non-conformists to take me down, obviously as some form of punishment to them for bucking the old guard’s system, as this trio of vamps hadn’t been the usual grade of specialized killers they normally sent after me.

I guess the ruling vamps don’t like people who upset the status quo and make waves either. Looking back at it, I suppose I should have been offended that they considered using me to do their dirty work. But at the time I wasn’t too picky about the vampires I eradicated to think of it. A vamp was a vamp as far as I was concerned, and I didn’t mind too much killing them.

And I’ll be damned if one of those nonconformists vampires didn’t track me down and then just walk right up and offer his life to me with no resistance at all… if only I would listen to what he had to say first.

I’m not going to go into how they found me right now because it seemed to be nothing more than a fluke of a number of random events working together, and not any real tracking skills on their parts.

But this bizarre vamp said he would gladly let me kill him after he was done speaking, if that was still my desire.

I had to admit; I thought the undead bastard was as crazy as a hatter. However by then, I had been growing tired of all the nonstop killing, and I thought why not do something a little bit different this time and listen to him rant first… and then kill him.

It seemed no matter how many I found and killed, there always seemed to be more vampires to take their place anyway. So it was pretty much out of curiosity and the weirdness of it all that I let him have his say.

Honest, I really did plan on killing him in the end, no matter what he said.

Best laid plans of mice and half-breed vampires, right? Or maybe it was a Murphy’s Law for Bloodsuckers that was in effect.

No one was more surprised that these three vampires walked away in the end than I was.

The vampire who first approached me, the one that seemed to be in charge, first needlessly explained to me that there were different vampire covens… a fact that I was already aware of, and stated that I was.

What he told me next was something I hadn’t known, that there were some covens that wanted nothing more than to live in peace with mankind, and who hunted animals instead of humans for what they needed.

I was informed that the trio of vampires facing me now were representatives of such peaceful covens.

I had in fact noticed that the eyes of some vampires were gold, while others were red, but never though much on the matter and made no effort to find out what the difference meant. To me as I said, a vampire was a vampire… period.

It was at that first meeting that he informed me what the eyes meant. Later when I had time. I looked back over the years, and I suddenly realized that the golden-eyed vampires had always seemed more willing to run from conflict with me instead of fight if they were able.

That they also tended to live in more stable environments rather than roam over wide areas like the red-eyes seem to. The gold-eyes had even lived in groups more like human families, and at the time I remember thinking they did so to better blend in with their human prey, and feeling that it was a mockery of what was taken from me whenever I ran across them. The sight of such things made me loathe them even more. The killings of these vampire families were among some of the most vicious attacks I’d ever performed.

At first I didn’t want to believe what they were telling me, that the golden-eyed vampires were in ways vastly more civilized than their transient red-eyed cousins. Eventually despite my resistance to the idea, not even I could deny it. The evidence had been there right in front of me all along.

The vampires that had killed Stephanie had red eyes, that detail I would never forget for as long as I lived because I saw those eyes every time I dreamed. I should have noticed when I looked them in the eyes just before I killed them, not all the vamps were the same.

In my hatred, in my quest for vengeance, I had never let myself see those little but strangely important differences in my enemies.

It never occurred to me that vampires could endeavor to lead a decent and moral life if they chose. They didn’t all have to be monsters.

And in fighting monsters, perhaps I’d become an even bigger monster?

I asked their leader why he was bothering to tell all this to me? Why not just try and kill me in justice for all that I had done against the peaceful members of their kind?

And he told me that they had learned pieces of what led to my vendetta, and that they understood why I relentlessly pursued it. Unlike red-eyed vamps that mostly stick together in very small groups for the purpose of hunting and survival, they stay with their covens for a sense of community and love for each other. And indeed, I had been observing these three, and they did seem to have an odd relationship of mutual respect and support that I had never seen or noted in human hunting vampires.

They themselves said didn’t blame me… because they would have done the very same thing in my place if one of their family members had been harmed or killed.

They also asked of me, that I had to understand on the same account, that they all had lost friends and family through my actions… but that they were willing to settle this in a civilized manner if it would stop the killing. The tall blonde vampire had explained that they were trying to change their society for the better, that it would be a slow change for certain led by example, but that they all believed it could be done eventually.

And in order to do that, they had to be the first to lead by that example, and that killing me would serve no purpose other than to reinforce the old ways that the Volturi wished to maintain.

He concluded that speech with the fact that I could kill all three of them now, if I still desired, but with them would die the effort and the hope… and any possible future where man and vampire could co-exist.

He also said that in every war, there must come a time for both sides to set aside their causes and make peace, to put down their weapons, find a balance they both could live with, to let the old wounds finally heal, and to go back to living again.

The damned crazy bastard was right.

At that first meeting, I hate to admit I was still far from believing what they said. But this vampire who was willing to die if something could be done to end over forty years of killing intrigued me.

We meet several more times on neutral ground, and even the other two vampires with the tall light-haired one told me their stories, of the wrongs I’ve done to them, and their willingness to make peace. They didn’t look as positive about it as their leader, but they both also offered me their lives if I wanted them.

I had not originally meant to disclose more about myself to them, but somewhere along the line I found myself telling them my story in full, perhaps it was only to somewhat justify my actions to them after they had told me the grief I had personally brought to them with my war. Perhaps it was I wished somewhere inside for them to know that I had not asked for this.

The trio listened with a patient ear, and then said they now found an even deeper understanding in my own reasons for my hatred of their kind, and expressed genuine sorrow for my loss.

I had never thought that any vampire, let alone three of them, would see my pain, let alone acknowledge it… and grieve with me for what I had lost.

And so I entered into a covert pact with these three… persons of honor, I guess I would have to call them.

I agreed to end my war, to stop hunting vampires; in return, they would aid me in disappearing and fake my death to the Volturi.

To me, they gave their pledge that neither they nor anyone in their covens would ever take a human life, except in self-defense, and that they would do their best to covert other vampires and covens to their way of life.

They allowed me the same provision, to only kill another vampire in self-defense, or defense of another innocent. They knew they couldn’t promise anything for the vamps that still hunted humans, but they said they could almost assure me that I would never have a problem with a vampire who had gold eyes.

I only had to actively stop hunting all vampires, and I could walk away… most likely for good. I would get to start a new life, and they could go to the Volturi claiming success with their task. My reported demise would require some props and faked evidence to support it, but it would also buy them a well-earned respite from Volturi interference while they set up they’re human friendly communities.

Their leader assured me that the Volturi would have to give the coven leaders who brought down the infamous Lucifer, room to grow and direct their covens as they saw fit, or face harsh questions from the other vampires they governed.

The Volturi were powerful, but they still must maintain a balance with the subjects they ruled.

I did walk away from that war torn existence, and into a new quieter life… and with this book written by what I supposed was the closest thing to a vampire doctor.

Fifty years later, in a single level home in the Seattle suburbs, I was hoping that somewhere in these old pages there might be the answer to what was amiss with my unexpected houseguest.

Even if I had refused to add my own unique condition to his growing store of vampire knowledge, I hoped that the vampire who had been calling himself Eleazar at the time, had in addition to describing the perplexing malady that effected my guest, also left me with some solutions in his book on how to cure whatever was wrong with her.

It was a very slim chance that I might find anything, but probably the best one I had at the moment.

I sat down by my computer and began to read through the manuscript. Should I find a promising clue or something useful in the neatly typed pages, I was hoping that some of the more occult websites I had found since the invention of the Internet might add some modern information to the compilation.